From National Review, November 19, 2007, pp. 58, 60-61.
© 2007 by National Review Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
Reprinted by permission.

Godly Republic:
A Centrist Blueprint for
America’s Faith-Based Future,
by John J. DiIulio Jr.
(California, 329 pp., $24.95)

Faith and Works

RYAN T. ANDERSON

John DiIulio is an enigma. An Ivy League professor with a Ph.D. from Harvard, tenure from Princeton, and now an endowed chair at Penn, he is also a devout Roman Catholic who refers to himself as “born again” and credits black Pentecostalists for his return to faith. A pro-life, pro-family social conservative, he is also a pro-poor registered Democrat who served in the highest levels of the Bush administration as our nation’s first “faith czar.”

Listening to DiIulio is always a good idea, for he is that rare breed who claims to be a political moderate and actually is. Add to these centrist sensibilities his groundbreaking research on crime, poverty, and religion and his firsthand experience with Philadelphia’s faith-based social services, and you begin to see why DiIulio draws such attention.

His new book, Godly Republic, confirms that the attention is deserved. It combines social science, political theory, and American history with policy wonkery and religious altar call (or, better, soup-kitchen call). Citing statistics and the Founding Fathers with equal facility, DiIulio explains what he wanted to achieve with faith-based initiatives, why they went wrong, and how to make them work. The result is an eloquent and discerning book.

The basic problem is that poverty, crime, and failing schools haven’t gone away. One in five black children lives with his family on under $17,000 a year, one-third of all black men end up in jail, and almost half of all black teens drop out of high school. As DiIulio notes, these kids have been “failed by family members, neighbors, religious believers, fellow citizens, and government officials.”

But he recognizes that more New Deal solutions aren’t the answer. His solution is to stop discriminating against faith-based social-service providers. Though they may do it “for Jesus,” most of these providers are “faith-based,” not “faith-saturated”: They serve the poor irrespective of their religious faith, use no religious test in hiring, and abide by state regulations — and thus are constitutionally eligible for federal assistance. They’re also effective. As Hillary Clinton has pointed out, who is more likely to help the neediest than someone “who sees God at work in the lives of even the most hopeless and left-behind of our children”?

The idea, then, is to open government-by-proxy to all qualified providers, not just secular ones. Government money wouldn’t fund sectarian worship or proselytizing, but only the vital social work that religious communities do. DiIulio notes that America’s social capital is spiritual: Half of all civic institutions are religious. And one thing that religious institutions do better than any other is mobilize volunteers — yet they remain an under-funded resource that the government has (unconstitutionally) discriminated against. This was supposed to end in 1996 with the welfare-reform bill, but its provisions allowing faith-based groups to receive federal monies were never truly implemented. DiIulio’s job under Bush was to create a level playing field, tilted neither toward nor away from religious groups.

The Founders, especially James Madison, inspire DiIulio’s work. As he sees it, according to “every valid historical source and measure,” most “framers were indisputably Bible-believing Protestants.” Even the Deists and agnostics among the Founders “were unfailingly faith-friendly.” The agnostic Franklin, for example, “called for prayer at the Constitutional Convention and insisted that public schools teach that the Bible’s God is real.” But the Founders also denied that government “should favor Christians or any other religious group.” According to Madison’s Federalist 51, America was to be a place where a “multiplicity of sects” would flourish — neither a secular nor a Christian nation.

The “faithful consensus” the Founders reached, which was respected for most of our nation’s history, splintered in the 20th century when “orthodox secularists” and “orthodox sectarians” tried to advance their partisan causes. But we should try to restore the Founders’ consensus, because it works. In DiIulio’s telling, the Supreme Court best articulated this idea in its 1971 Lemon decision, which set up three criteria for church-state relations: Government action must have a secular purpose, a primary effect neither advancing nor inhibiting religion, and no excessive entanglement with religion. Or, as DiIulio puts it: “government neutrality and equal protection, not strict separation or special treatment.”

The public agrees. While elite America may be launching culture wars between red believers and blue secularists, the vast majority of the nation is purple, happy with government support of sacred groups that serve secular purposes. Many political leaders accept this, too. Bush and Gore campaigned on virtually the same faith-based social-service message, and Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman have also been strong supporters.

But if so many people favor this equilibrium, what went wrong with the faith-based initiatives program? In a word: politics. Before the program got off the ground, orthodox secularists raised hell. At the same time, upon learning that Bush and DiIulio were planning to play within the bounds of settled constitutional law, orthodox sectarians denounced DiIulio’s proposals as “Christophobic” and demanded taxpayer money for religious worship and evangelism. Republican operatives used the faith-based office merely to score political points with the base (for which DiIulio called them “Mayberry Machiavellis”), while Democrats refused to let Bush “win big through compromise.” One even told DiIulio, “I don’t care if [you] re-type Clinton’s stuff and give Gore credit. . . . This president is getting nothing else fast, no matter what.”

Yet DiIulio says that Bush never wavered in his commitment to the notion that faith-based initiatives should be non-partisan, fully constitutional, and truly effective for the poor. This remains, DiIulio insists, the winning strategy for the future. We should be neither allergic nor addicted to government, embracing instead the Catholic principle of subsidiarity: The family is the fundamental unit of society — the best department of health, education, and welfare — but it sometimes needs help. The first responders should be extended family, neighbors, the local church, and other civic groups, but government, too, plays a role.

While much of DiIulio’s book is right on target, there are weaknesses. Certainly he is correct that an agency combating poverty or illiteracy shouldn’t use its funds to support religious worship. But he is wrong in thinking that the Lemon test is entirely faithful to the Founders. Religious institutions, from their perspective, serve the common good not only in the social services they provide, but also in the spiritual goods they nurture. The best reading of the Constitution shows that the government has pledged only neutrality among religious traditions, not a denial of funding to any of them.

In practice, though, government probably should steer clear of entanglement; the health of America’s religions lies precisely in their independence from government. This is one reason religious leaders should be wary of faith-based partnerships: The more they depend on government funds, the less freedom they will enjoy to minister, even for social purposes, in the way they see fit. Consider how Boston’s Catholic Charities was forced either to leave the adoption business or to violate its firm conviction that every child deserves a mother and a father. With government money comes government meddling. More fundamentally, couldn’t public funding for the “secular” portions of a faith-based service ultimately water down the “sacred” portions?

And might faith-based initiatives simply create ever more entitlements, swelling an already strained welfare state while also weakening civil society? Since one of the most important checks on government is a robust, independent civic sphere, we should be concerned when private organizations sup at the teat of Uncle Sam. Furthermore, as DiIulio notes, since the 1950s the federal government has assumed responsibility for problems that were previously considered outside its purview. DiIulio thinks this is good. Many do not. For if seeing a panhandler on the sidewalk causes you to say “government should do something about that,” then you already suffer from the morally corrupting consequences of the welfare state. This also applies to foundering faith-based organizations whose first response is to turn to the government, not the faithful. Wouldn’t it be better if all of the vital organs of civil society that DiIulio admits best serve the poor were sustained directly by their benefactors? Might faith-based initiatives encourage the opposite? If government is responsible for fixing the poor, then I’ve done my part by paying my taxes — especially if they leave me with little for private donations.

I wish DiIulio had addressed these questions, but perhaps they would have required another book. Whatever the answers may be, it’s clear that eliminating faith-based discrimination is a step in the right direction. For advancing this point with grace and good sense, we can thank John DiIulio.

Mr. Anderson is an assistant editor at First Things. A 2007 Phillips Foundation Fellow, he is the assistant director of the Program in Bioethics at the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J.